Pygmalion

First broadcast: Sat 12th Aug 2006, 13:00 on BBC 7

Imelda Staunton and Simon Cadell star in George Bernard Shaw's classic play about the refinement of Eliza Doolittle.

Named after a Greek mythological figure. It was first presented on stage to the public in 1913.

Pygmalion both delighted and scandalized its first audiences. A brilliantly witty reworking of the classical tale of the sculptor Pygmalion, who falls in love with his perfect female statue, it is also a barbed attack on the British class system and a statement of Shaw's feminist views. In Shaw's hands, the phoneticist Henry Higgins is the Pygmalion figure who believes he can transform Eliza Doolittle, a cockney flower girl, into a duchess at ease in polite society. The one thing he overlooks is that his 'creation' has a mind of her own.

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